Do Dogs Make Us Better Dads?

Are you considering getting a pet before having kids? In this episode of The HELP I’m A Dad Podcast, we'll explore five compelling reasons why dogs can make us better parents. 

From teaching us about responsibility to providing unconditional love, our furry friends can have a profound impact on our parenting journey. Whether you're a first-time dad or a seasoned veteran, you won't want to miss this informative and insightful episode. And as a special bonus, we'll also provide a discount code for Minimalist Mutt, a small business that creates high-quality dog leashes and collars. Mention our Podcast to receive 10% off your purchase, and feel good knowing that $5 from each sale goes to the nonprofit 'Save Our Scruff' to help save animals and find them safe homes. #NotASponsor

Listen now to discover how dogs can make us better parents!

Minimalist Mutt's Offering You 10% Off
Kristen+Beans+Cashew run an incredible small business that I love supporting Mention us for 10% Off

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

Transcripts Are Auto-Generated

00;00;00;09 - 00;00;18;03
Alex Brodie
Hey, what's going on? Future Alex here. I just want to ask that you listen to the whole thing through. There is something for you as a little surprise and a thank you part way through the episode. If you have dogs and you love that they look stylish, then this is perfect for you. Okay, onto the episode. Enjoy. I.

00;00;19;14 - 00;00;39;13
Alex Brodie
What's up, fellow dads? How are you doing today? Welcome back to The Help. I'm a Dad podcast where we talk about everything related to fatherhood. I'm your host, Alex Brody. Today we are talking about dogs. Yeah, dogs. And if they can properly prepare us for having kids. So my wife and I both had a cat and a dog.

00;00;39;19 - 00;01;00;04
Alex Brodie
And I'll tell you this, I think cats are better at preparing you for having teens than children. But dogs, they're a bit closer to kids in my mind. For those of you that don't know, my wife and I have recently decided that we have the green light to start growing our family. And this podcast is all about that journey as well as sharing those experiences with you, the listener.

00;01;00;23 - 00;01;27;28
Alex Brodie
It's a safe space for dads or dad adjacent individuals to support one another. Now, I had a conversation with a friend of mine recently on this topic. He has a dog, no kids yet, but he balked at the idea that dogs prepare you for being a parent. So in the end, my charismatic and convincing self got him to concede and meet halfway that having a dog is a good precursor to parenting.

00;01;28;08 - 00;01;57;28
Alex Brodie
I did that with one key reason, but since that conversation I've come up with a few more reasons and I've got a total of five now. So let me know in the comments or anywhere you can your opinion on this. If you have had a dog with four kids and if any of this is true, or if I'm completely way off base and I have no idea what I'm talking about because again, I'm learning I am a future dad, not a dad yet, but that's the exciting part and that's what I'm here to talk about today.

00;01;58;22 - 00;02;23;23
Alex Brodie
Number one, not number one is in. This is the highest priority. I just mean number one in the list. The first reason is one that I reverse engineered, if you will, because if you have a kid, what's a good way to teach that child responsibility? Give them a pet, Right? Owning a dog requires a person to take care of another living being, which can then in turn help teach that responsibility of taking care of another individual.

00;02;24;23 - 00;02;47;28
Alex Brodie
You have to feed them, groom them and exercise them, which encompasses taking care of its overall well-being. And no two dogs are identical. You have to take into account their breed tendencies, their personality, their personal and physical needs. This can be similar to the responsibilities of taking care of a child. No. So if you can give a dog a child to help teach them that, why not a grown adult?

00;02;48;23 - 00;03;11;06
Alex Brodie
End of the day, if you've never had that experience and that type of responsibility, I'm sure you can imagine it. But you don't know firsthand hand. And I think a dog is a great way of teaching responsibility. Number two and this is the one I got my body to concede on is patience. Raising a dog requires patience. Dogs may not always behave as you expect.

00;03;11;17 - 00;03;29;25
Alex Brodie
Right. And you can spend countless hours honing in on a trick or a command that one day they just aren't feeling it and they don't go through the motions. And of course, it's the day when you want to show off to somebody. But funnily enough, for those dog owners out there, that could actually be the trigger that causes your dog to not perform as expected.

00;03;29;26 - 00;03;49;06
Alex Brodie
If the environment changes from where they learned that initial trick or command and it hasn't been socialized in various places, there is a very good chance that your paper won't make the connection. This is pretty similar to the patience required when raising a child, at least in my mind. Kids can also have their own personalities and be unpredictable.

00;03;49;12 - 00;04;08;04
Alex Brodie
And if you don't understand right away why your child has changed behavior suddenly, at least from a male perspective, I'm pretty sure that we would try and figure out what the heck changed. And you have to have that patience to take a breath and figure it out. And if you can't figure it out in that moment, you have to have the patience to also reflect on it later in the day.

00;04;08;06 - 00;04;27;23
Alex Brodie
Right. Because it might not be that obvious in the moment. You have to sit back and play everything back. And that takes patience. And you have to understand that. Now, the bonus to that point, 2.1 or 2.5, two and a half, is that if you can't outwait your dog in certain situations, your dog will learn to take advantage of that.

00;04;28;09 - 00;04;55;19
Alex Brodie
Same with kids. They're all friggin smarter than we think 100%. Like for instance, with your dogs, you should only see a command once as a rule of thumb. Otherwise, if you say it again and again and again, because you are impatient, they'll never learn to listen the first time. They will think, Oh, Mom is starting to say the three words in a row that she needs to say or the dad needs to say in order for me to come over.

00;04;56;06 - 00;05;34;28
Alex Brodie
No, you have to wait and see it once. Coming on to number three is building a strong emotional bond. It is so easy to lose yourself in the day to day modern society. But dogs make us more human. Man's best friend, as the saying goes. And just like a child, a dog can become a beloved member of the family, helping to build a strong emotional bond and reminding us to come back to reality, back to what is important to us and knock ourselves out of that headspace where we might have been thinking about things that are just not as important as the moments that we share with our family.

00;05;35;18 - 00;05;52;27
Alex Brodie
Now, before I go on to the next reason why dogs prepare us to be better fathers, at least in my opinion, I want to give a shout out to Minimalist Mutt, which is a small business based out of Hamilton, Ontario, and hashtag not a sponsor. Just so you know, and the link will be in the description, it's minimalist mutt.

00;05;53;01 - 00;06;11;07
Alex Brodie
Dot com. It's funny how all of this just sort of happens and when life presents itself and you just go with it, that it just makes you smile when you look back. So let me back up and get you all up to speed. After we decided we wanted to grow our family. I think one of the next logical step is, Oh, let's get excited and jump in like I did right now.

00;06;11;08 - 00;06;29;26
Alex Brodie
Doing all this research and making a podcast about it. But what we did together as a family unit is we ended up stopping into a store called Nest, which has various accouterment for baby decor and while perusing around we saw a display of leashes and my wife pointed out that we had bumped into the creator of those leashes a year prior at a park.

00;06;29;27 - 00;06;50;08
Alex Brodie
Her name was Kristen with her two dogs and she was super nice, super engaging, and she told us about her business. So when we were talking about it a year ago, I said in my mind, definitely going to check those out and I forgot about it. I hate to say it, I've been using a day planner since I've gotten really so much better at planning and staying up to date with all these things instead of jumping around and getting distracted.

00;06;50;08 - 00;07;08;09
Alex Brodie
But anyways, I clocks the leashes and I locked down into my brain. Then I walked around for a little bit more. And then sometimes as you do, I felt this internal pressure to buy something and I bought the leash. Now I've been using it for about three weeks now during the luckiest, wettest weather, and I could not be happier with the purchase.

00;07;08;10 - 00;07;36;02
Alex Brodie
Not only is the leash durable and comfortable to hold goodbye rope burn from those tugging moments, but it also looks sleek as heck. And it's made with vegan leather. So if you have any qualms about using real leather, this piece is actually perfect. Check out our colors on our website. The best part is knowing that every purchase we get to make a difference in another animal's life because minimalist Mutt donates $5 from every sale to save our Scruff, which is a nonprofit for rescuing dogs and finding them safe homes.

00;07;36;08 - 00;07;54;16
Alex Brodie
Again, this is not a sponsor. I am doing this because I know there's value there and I appreciate what she's doing. She volunteers with Save Our Scruff. She started this business because she wanted to make the dogs look good, attractive, so that potential adopters would be more inclined to adopt. And then she opened this business long of the short.

00;07;54;17 - 00;08;26;10
Alex Brodie
I reached out to her and she was totally happy to give any fans of this show 10% off whatever they buy when they mentioned The Help I'm a Dad podcast in their order. It's not an affiliate, it's not sponsored. This is simply me providing a win win win for everybody involved. The link is in the description. I highly urge you to check it out and with that lovely story that actually ties in to number four, because what better segway than having our dogs help us understand the concept of unconditional love, which can be a key element in raising any child.

00;08;26;19 - 00;08;43;24
Alex Brodie
A dog will love and accept its owner regardless of their mistakes, just as a child will love and accept their parent. But it goes both ways. Your dog has bad gas due to too many tradeoffs. You still love him. Has the runs due to too many treetops? You still love him, gets into the treat cabinet and eats all the treetops.

00;08;44;05 - 00;09;09;06
Alex Brodie
You still love him? Heartache. I think as parents, we are shackled with unconditional love to our children, sometimes unrequited, or at least sometimes it seems that way. And hopefully for most cases there is a love love relationship going on. There. But that's a topic for another podcast episode. Now, the last and final one sort of ties into the first one with responsibility, but slightly different dogs prepare us for the practical aspects of parenting.

00;09;09;12 - 00;09;26;11
Alex Brodie
Your dog has the runs from too many credos. You have to clean its butt and potentially that mess, it still has diarrhea. You have to settle their stomachs with maybe some rice and some chicken. If you don't know that, it actually works pretty darn well, Maybe they have a guppy. I use that unconditional love and get in there and do the work and clean it up.

00;09;26;15 - 00;09;51;14
Alex Brodie
It's not clearing up. Time to contact the vet and set up an appointment. What time works best? You need to do the planning. Okay, You're there. Wow, that was fast. I just have to put these drops in the eye every day. Oh, this is my built. I have to remortgage my house for this. Sometimes it gets expensive, and I hope if you have a dog or any animal that you are planning or have animal insurance and the same thing goes with kids, you have to budget.

00;09;51;22 - 00;10;11;25
Alex Brodie
And here's a piece of advice that I got recently. Kids are as expensive as you want them to be. Take that with a grain of salt. Reflect on that. I think it's true. So the practical aspect of parenting is responsibility, but it also teaches us that this is the way a stoic mantra that I personally use in my day to day and pretty sure was first exposed to while watching The Mandalorian.

00;10;12;07 - 00;10;35;01
Alex Brodie
But that, again, is a podcast for another day. I really do believe that dogs are a great resource for helping us be better parents, but it is important to acknowledge and note and understand that owning a dog is not a guarantee that you will be a good parent. And it does not replace the experience of raising a child and the hard work needed to be the best dad you know you can be.

00;10;35;11 - 00;10;56;13
Alex Brodie
However, it is a good way to get a sense of the responsibilities and the emotional aspect of taking care of another living being. That wraps up this episode, and I want to thank you for subscribing to this podcast and staying with me all the way through. And if you aren't subscribed, please seriously consider it. It helps us out a lot.

00;10;56;13 - 00;11;13;22
Alex Brodie
And also let me know about what you think about the topic we just talked about. Here's to being the best dads that we can be. I thanks for being a part of this community and following us wherever you get your podcasts. If you'd like to leave some of your insights, you can find us on Instagram currently at Help.

00;11;13;22 - 00;11;28;09
Alex Brodie
I'm a Dad podcast or click the link in the description to leave a voicemail. We'd love to hear from you. Your message might even be featured on a future episode of our show. We appreciate your support and can't wait to hear from you. Much love.